The Blind Search

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

When Nonie Johnson kidnaps her daughter from the adoptive parents, Jesse Falkenstein is brought in. Something seemed wrong from the start - Nonie just wasn't the maternal type, and then she suddenly vanished from sight. The search for Nonie Johnson yielded nothing but a series of wild goose chases. Fortunately, Jesse had two aces up his sleeve: a brother-in-law in the police, and a number of unorthodox psychic acquaintances who had their own way of seeking clues. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“At least,” said Jesse, “you can go back to bed.”

“Me and Athelstane,” agreed Nell, finishing her coffee. “I know I once said two at least, but right now I’ll settle for the one we’ve got.” She yawned.

Jesse grinned at her. “Old Hebrew proverb—small children disturb one’s sleep, big children one’s life.”

“Don’t borrow trouble,” said Nell sleepily. David Andrew, aged five months, had kept them up most of the night; she was still in her robe, her waist-length brown hair untidily
braided. Athelstane, the mastiff, who was a conscientious dog, had dutifully patrolled the nursery too, and now was dozing heavily on Jesse’s feet. Jesse prodded him.

“Get off me, monster—I’ve got to go to work.”

“And do have a nice day.” Nell yawned again. The baby, of course, was now peacefully asleep. “Don’t forget Fran and Andrew are coming for dinner.” As Jesse got up
she poured herself more coffee.

Switching on the ignition and backing the Dodge out into the drive, Jesse shook himself further awake with a little effort, and it wasn’t only the effect of one sleepless night. He felt
stale and slightly jaundiced with life; maybe along in the mid-thirties most people did, with the dawning realization that it seemed to be just more of the same damned thing over and over.

Even after three months he had to remind himself not to turn left on Hollywood Boulevard; he went straight down to Wilshire, lucky in missing signals. He’d moved into the new office in
May—just before the old man went. It was a bigger, newer office in a tall building out on Wilshire, with a more spacious waiting room, a secretarial office big enough to accommodate all his
growing files and his new and invaluable twin secretaries; business had picked up over the last couple of years, and in a few other ways he’d been lucky. But, having left the Dodge in the
basement garage and ridden the elevator up to the third floor, he wandered down the carpeted corridor to regard his office door with something near to dislike.

The sign was new too, conforming to all the other signs on doors here in shape, finish and lettering, J. D. FALKENSTEIN,
ATTORNEY-AT-LAW.

He went in, and routine snapped him up with its inaudible jaws. “Morning, girls.”

The Gordons, Jean and Jimmy (Jamesina) looked up smiling from typewriter and filing cabinet. Nice girls: efficient and pretty, and nearly identical: natural blonds with big brown eyes.
“Good morning, Mr. Falkenstein—” Jean; “I’ll have the Dixon will ready this morning. Mr. Blythe just called, he wants to see you at one to discuss the Acme
suit.”

“Oh, hell,” said Jesse.

“And the Reddin divorce hearing’s been postponed again,” said Jimmy. “I don’t know what these judges do to earn their salaries, every time they feel like a day
off— You’ve got an appointment at ten, new clients, and the Frommer-Dakin contract’s on your desk, I finished typing it last night.”

“I don’t know why I bother to come in,” said Jesse. “You girls could run the place between you.” He went on into his office, sat at the desk and absently pulled his
tie loose; the neat blue-covered package of the contract was centered on the blotter, but he didn’t pick it up. Air conditioning on in here; it was August and a heat wave building up outside.
He looked around the good-sized square room, vaguely dissatisfied with himself and life.

A nice office, prosperous-looking. Nell had picked out the moss-green carpet, the bleached oak paneling. The L-shaped desk still felt too big after the years at his old one. The silent-gliding
file drawers at one side were convenient, the tape recorder discreetly mounted underneath. Facing him on the opposite wall was the one picture, a commandingly large and good print, heavily
walnut-framed, of Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More. Surprisingly, that had been the old man’s gift. The thin ascetic face with its long Norman nose, faint shadow of beard and
brilliant dark eyes seemed to stare back at him remotely.

“Oh, hell,” he said to himself again, and reached reluctantly for the contract. He heard the outer door open and shut: the mail, probably. Whereas the party of the first part,
subject to the exceptions noted below, agrees . . .

“Am I interrupting anything?”

Match poised to a cigarette, Jesse glanced up and after a moment said, “Come in,” and jumped and swore as the match flame reached his finger.

“Seen a ghost?” said his visitor, dead-pan.

“Something like that.” Jesse lit the cigarette and leaned back. How many times did the old man look in just like that and say the same thing— Never mind. “What are you
doing here, William?”

“Got something to show you,” said DeWitt laconically. “I don’t know if you’ll think it’s worth interrupting your torts or whatever.” He sat down in one
of the clients’ chairs, a man nearly as lank and tall and dark as Jesse, his thin intelligent face impassive, and took off his black-rimmed glasses; he made no move to open the brief case on
his knees.

Jesse cocked his head at him. “Something?”

“Not much,” said DeWitt. “It’s so much like groping in the dark. Blindman’s buff. I just thought you’d like to see it.” He began to open the brief
case.

Jesse put down the contract. Sudden and fleeting, he was thinking of the day DeWitt had showed up here so unexpectedly, last May. Sitting where he sat now, talking and talking, bitter, resigned,
humorous, cynical, hopeful, dogged. He thought now, a little cynical himself on that, that it could possibly be that whatever else he’d accomplished or would accomplish in life might turn out
to be less important than his tenuous association with DeWitt. Or, of course, possibly not.

What came out of the brief case was a tightly rolled scroll of ordinary cheap drawing paper. “Mrs. Ventnor,” said Jesse with a small sigh.

“Well, in the midst of all the chaff—”

“Good term for it. The automatic writing I suspect just congenitally.”

He’d first met DeWitt a couple of years ago when a client of his had got herself murdered. Margaret Brandon, a nice woman: and a privately practicing trance medium. It was that small
association that had set Jesse to reading some in the field. DeWitt had been on the staff of the Parapsychology Foundation at the time; after he’d been back to testify at the trial, Jesse
hadn’t seen or heard of him until that day last May. He’d been a dispirited man, and he’d unburdened himself to Jesse, as an interested layman who had a sufficient background of
knowledge in the subject but wasn’t officially associated with it.

“I swear to God,” he said, “the whole parcel of them are as much slaves to orthodoxy as those fellows who took after Galileo. I have had it, Falkenstein. Going around in
circles—and not even coming full circle back to where it started, at that. I’d be the first to admit that, at least for now, we can’t call psychic research an exact science, but
if we’re going to use the scientific method at it, there are certain first principles, for God’s sake. All right—all right! It seems to me, just speaking as a damn fool
who’s spent twenty-five years studying the subject, that the one unequivocal first principle here is the question of individual survival of death. Everything else, for God’s sake, grows
out of that, all the rest of it is—side roads. Whatever fancy names they dream up for all the rest—telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation, apports, whatever the hell psychic
forces—it’s all of a piece, and the one central important fact, the significant evidence underlying all of it, is the evidence for individual survival.”

“You sound like one of those impassioned spiritualists, circa 1890.”

“My God, do I know it!” yelped DeWitt. “Don’t tell me—you’ve read some of that, you said, all the evidence we’ve already got. Reams of it, all buried in
the musty old files of the British and American societies, and who the hell has read it in the last fifty years? Of the stuff that got into public print, reams of that too, who the hell reads Myers
and Sidgwick and Lodge and Doyle these days?”

“Your foundation—”

“Not mine. I have had it with all these people—not just the foundation, but every so-called research organization I know of—part of it is that they’re following fashion,
I suppose you could say, but the upshot is that they’ve all thrown out the baby with the bath, and don’t mention mixed metaphors to me. Wasting time and money and argument over
card-guessing games and mental marvels who can bend picture wire by concentration, and they won’t touch the survival evidence with a barge pole. They’re so damned determined to be
accepted as scientists with a capital, they shy off that like—like scared sheep,” said DeWitt. “Short-sighted—or do I mean blind? Do they think, my God, they can escape the
one central fact by just not talking about it? If you postulate a psychic force at all, damn what forms it takes, from poltergeists to clairvoyance to telekinesis, the ultimate conclusion comes
right back to personal survival, the persisting soul, and once you’ve got sound evidence for that everything else follows. I tell you,” said DeWitt angrily, “I’m beginning
to believe, absurd as it sounds to anyone who knows the literature, that we’ve got to go right back to the start, produce all the evidence all over again for this century. This damned
skeptical materialistic century that can’t believe those old fellows back in the eighties and nineties were capable of using scientific methods. Maybe if we rubbed their noses in it—
And there’ve been hints of a couple of new exciting things in that direction, if some concerted effort was made to follow it up in an organized way—the tape communication, if
you—”

“That,” said Jesse, “is but too far out.”

“Not that far. It opens such possibilities— Bayliss has suggested, and I’m bound to say it strikes me as damned logical, that one reason this century hasn’t got even the
handful of really great mediums the nineteenth had is that the other side is tired of trying to use the imperfect human personality—even with a good medium the unconscious is always
interfering—and possibly the various technical experts on that plane want to experiment—”

“Don’t like that word ‘planes.’ Call it levels of vibration.”

“—experiment with machines instead. It makes some sort of sense. But damn the vehicle, it seems to me we’ve got to go right back to the beginning and collect the same sort of
solid survival evidence all over again—not to get the scientific recognition, my God, but to open any new paths for investigation at all. Stop fooling around on all the side roads, and get
back to solid research. What I’m proposing is something on the lines of the British mediums’ bureau, a small set fee for sittings with mediums, and full records kept. As the evidence
accumulates, get it in print—”

“What impression do you think you might make? I see what you’re getting at, but trying to break the barriers of orthodox science, when the Rhines and your foundation are just barely
respectable even now—”

“Barely! Barriers and orthodox science be damned,” said DeWitt roundly. “To get even the bare recognition, they’ve chased off down all the side roads—scared of the
four-letter word soul.”

“And I don’t know that it’d do much for my reputation to be associated with you, if you were asking.”

DeWitt laughed. “You don’t have to appear on a letterhead. But a few of us are getting together on it, and we’ll need a treasurer to keep a few accounts. I suppose we could
manage a fee. Knowing you’re interested in the field—”

And that had been the week after the old man died. Jesse had said abruptly, surprising himself, “I might waive the fee, DeWitt, if you could get me a bona-fide communication. . .
.”

Old Edgar Walters had been a friend for only those few short years, and he’d had a good-sized family of his own, and, Jesse supposed, an eminently satisfactory life—and death, for
he’d gone the way he’d have chosen, the old reprobate: between one second and another, as he renewed a third drink from the bottle always bulging his jacket. Eighty-four his last
birthday, and still as shrewd as they came, still forever interested in life and people: it was reasonable to suppose that he still was, and still concerned with the people who’d meant
something to him here—planes or levels of vibrations or whatever. It seemed that he’d thought something of Jesse Falkenstein; he’d left him a lot of money in a new will. The old
man had had a lot of money to leave, and most of it had gone to his family, all of whom were nice respectable people with better sense than to waste it on an attempt to contest the will. It had
been a surprise to Jesse; but he’d rather have had the old man still around, looking in his office door—“Not interruptin’ anything important, hey?”—and on
occasion coming out with some shrewd piece of advice over a puzzle.

DeWitt’s little organization now had a name—the Western Association for Psychic Research—and a letterhead, and modest quarters in a rather shabby office out on Santa Monica
Boulevard, and records were starting to fill its filing cabinets, for what they were worth. A couple of local members of the foundation, Marcus Golding and Arthur Haney, both with enough money to
spare, had underwritten the fairly modest upkeep. DeWitt wasn’t dependent on a salary, had private means of his own. They had come up with four “developing psychics,” as the term
was these days, willing and eager to dedicate their time for the small set fees, the sittings by appointment presided over by DeWitt’s inhumanly efficient secretary, Miss Duffy. Mrs. Alice
Ventnor produced the automatic writing; Cora Delaney and Wanda Moreno were trance mediums, and Charles MacDonald had some reputation as a psychometrist.

Now and then Jesse dropped in to look at the latest transcriptions, or DeWitt brought him some interesting tidbit that had just showed up. DeWitt was a happy man, pottering about his chosen
piece of research; that it was difficult and obscure ground to work he had already known.

Now Jesse looked at the long scroll of drawing paper in DeWitt’s hand with faint cynicism and repeated, “Mrs. Ventnor.”

“Well, we have to take what comes,” said DeWitt. “There’s always a good deal of chaff in automatic writing. You have to sort out the few grains of wheat there may be. I
just thought you’d like to see this, for whatever it’s worth. It came through last night.” He began to unroll the scroll, and Jesse reached for the bottom of it, only faintly
interested.

It was a very typical example of automatic writing: covered all over with penciled scrawls, exhibiting at least eight different scripts from a childishly large half-printing to a fine,
near-Spencerian hand. It was, of course, shirking the accumulated evidence to put all automatic writing down as a product of the unconscious mind, but it wasn’t the kind of evidence Jesse
liked; it was chancy, scrambled.

He didn’t like this example of it much at all. As usual, it consisted of a lot of disconnected words and half sentences without capitals or punctuation. Claire clare de lune i didnt
want to go meet me you met me i wanted want you to listen when i try— The lines trailed off the right side of the page, the script changed, more disconnected words not making much sense,
a beautiful series of precise circles, more jumbled phrases in the Spencerian hand.

Jesse grunted at it. “There may be something there,” said DeWitt, “all that Claire bit. It seems to be part of a longer attempt at communication, some of it’s come
through Mrs. Delaney in trance, but we haven’t correlated it all yet. This is what I wanted you to see.” His long forefinger pointed out a single line in the center of the page.

It was in an angular, square script, heavy and firm: the single instance of that on the page. will try will will try now tell j j j j will try wait and see get thru.

Jesse shook his head at it. “It might mean anything.”

DeWitt began to roll up the scroll again. “It might. But whoever, whatever produces all that, it is communication, you know. From mind to mind—one entity invisible to us, but there.
Wherever. Incontrovertibly there.” He put the scroll away in his brief case and gave Jesse a sudden open grin. “I suspect, you hardheaded shyster, that you sometimes think we’re
all wasting our lives chasing after fairy gold. But it’s worth doing, as it was worth doing nearly a hundred years back when those first researchers blazed the trail.” He fastened the
brief case slowly. “In the furor and madness and blood that is the twentieth century we’ve got to believe that it’s worth doing.”

Jean Gordon’s neat blond head poked in the door. “Mr. and Mrs. Lanning are here, Mr. Falkenstein.”

“I’m just going,” said DeWitt.

Jesse put out his cigarette and stood up automatically. The Lannings were new clients.

They came in purposefully, and trouble came with them, he saw. Trouble often came in with clients to a lawyer’s office. He sized them up at a glance: no money to guess
at, but nice people, both in their forties, well-dressed if not smart. Lanning was stocky, a little overweight, his sandy hair receding from a high forehead; he wore rimless glasses, a decent gray
suit with a white shirt and discreet tie. She had probably been a pretty girl and was still attractive, with a trim figure, her dark hair simply waved back from a round face. She wore glasses too,
and not much makeup; her plain blue voile summer dress was crisply pressed. She’d been crying and he looked depressed.

“Mr. Falkenstein,” he said in an unexpected bass voice, and offered a soft han. . .